Susan Smith Family Substance Abuse

Introduction
The Smith family is that of a blended one, with the father, Jim, having recently married Susan who has a daughter of her own, Maddie, from a previous marriage. Jim’s own daughters include Emily, who is 20 years old, and Sarah, who is 17. Sara is struggling with a narcotics addiction, which has resulted in stresses within the family and the functioning of the family unit overall. An important asset to the family is Jim’s mother, as she has healthy relationships with all of the children as well as her son, Jim, and is very much an emotional support for the family during this time.
Collins, Jordan, and Coleman (2013) highlight that, “Focusing on just one person in the family, usually the one with the symptoms, places a burden on

As presented above, the neglect that Sarah felt led her to engage in—and subsequently develop an addiction—to drugs. For Emily, the neglect caused her to feel even more isolated and unappreciated in the family because now even more of Jim and Susan’s attention was directed towards Sarah because of her drug addiction. Apart from her grandma, Emily felt ostracized from the family unit and unable to effectively communicate or be heard.
Maddie, Susan’s daughter from a previous relationship and also the youngest child, experienced feelings of isolation as well, as her and Susan were new to the family unit and she hadn’t yet established strong and intimate bonds with any of the new family members. In addition to this were also feelings of discomfort, as Maddie had never personally known someone in her personal life to suffer from a drug

They see Maddie as innocent, but overall the sibling subsystem was one that was not characterized by strong bonds or understanding of the other sisters’ situations at all.
One universal pattern in the family is that everyone has a developed and healthy relationship with the grandma, Gertrude, because they felt she had everyone’s best interest at heart.
The variation that was affecting the family life cycle is the difficulty to continue to redefine positive family functioning. The two families coming together meant redefining family relationships and boundaries as mentioned above. From a family strengths-based perspective all family members had two things in common: the desire for Sarah to get clean and the want for to come together as a family that got along. The fact that the family members all desire cohesion and collective support from one another presents the members with a sense of protection and hope knowing that each family member ultimately values one another in some